JANUARY DINNER MEETING&PRESENTATION

Joint Meeting with OCCSI & LACSI

Topic: The Future of Construction: What’s the limit? Machines, Manpower, or the City?

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Are you ready for a robotic construction crew? How close is that future? Join us to learn about the future of construction by award winning visionary Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT). Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis has won multiple awards for the development of Contour Crafting (CC), a mega-scale 3D fabrication process aiming at automated on-site construction of whole structures, as well as subcomponents. Since the potential of CC has become evident from experiments with various materials, geometries and scales, the next step is entire structures. We are already seeing building components where plumbing and electrical utilities are embedded. Are your documents ready for an environment where robotic construction executes a single building or a colony of buildings? Join us to hear how close this technology is to being a reality, learn about the hurdles to getting it approved for use, and brainstorm with our speaker on solutions to how to get City building departments to approve this technology.

About our speaker: Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, Ph.D. received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1974. He received his M.S in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management from Oklahoma State University in 1979.

Chief among his accolades, he is National Academy of Inventor’s Fellow and Dean’s Professor of Industrial & Systems, Aerospace & Mechanical, Astronautics, Biomedical and Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) at USC.

In 2014, Dr. Khoshnevis was selected as the recipient of the Grand Prize of the Creating the Future design contest for invention of the Contour Crafting robotic construction technology. The program was organized by NASA Tech Briefs Media Group and sponsored by major industries including Intel and HP. The Grand Prize was given to only one of the more than 1,000 globally competing technologies.

Contour Crafting was selected as one of the top 25 out of more than 4,000 candidate inventions by the History Channel Modern Marvels program and the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame; and has been identified as one of the major disruptive technologies of our time.[7] Contour Crafting has been exhibited at numerous museums worldwide.

In 2016 Dr. Khoshnevis' other invention, SSS, won another NASA international top prize for the In-Situ Challenge Competition which concerned technologies that can build structures on the Moon and Mars out of local planetary materials. Khoshnevis proposed a proven approach using his SSS technology for autonomous construction of landing pads and roads as well as fabrication of interlocking bricks and other objects such as metallic tools and spare parts using in-situ materials